From Brad Shelton Sent Thu, Mar 11th 1999, 17:16
From Brad Shelton Sent Thu, Mar 11th 1999, 17:16
Hello Not too long ago some folks were discussing Ae's Envane, and at least one poster singled it out as being notably good (as in some of Ae's best).. I've got to thank whoever that was. Occasionally you hear a track that grabs you the first time you hear it and never lets go.. becoming a theme song for your life. Goz Quarter, yum. contented sigh.. Also recently picked up Cichli Suite, it's great also. Clearly a transitional piece between Chiastic Slide and lp5. Though I enjoy all their stuff I definitely prefer the more recent releases from Envane forward with lp5 being my fave. Random thoughts on some other recent purchases.. Chain Reaction Compiled is good but not essential IMO. It's always nice to have more CR Porter Ricks and Monolake tracks (I'm vinyl deprived), but in this case the previously non-CD tracks are pretty much alternate mixes of two Hong Kong and Biokinetics tracks. More interesting to me are the Pelon and Erosion tracks. Robert Henke's Floating Point release is fantastic. I didn't know until I got my copy, but Gerhard Behles was onboard for Floating Point. Not surprisingly then Floating Point shares some sounds and styles with Monolake, making this a work that stands up perfectly well on its own, but that can also be heard as a mostly-beatless Monolake release. Check out this great interview at Urban Sounds (http://www.urbansounds.com/home/studio/audiocode/us_instudio_henke.html). I was kind of overwhelmed by both the Black Dog and Autechre peel sessions. They just don't stand up to material such as Bytes and lp5 respectively, IMO.. Here's the big one.. Low Res. "I've been waiting for music like this all my life" etc. For those that haven't heard it, this material is the missing link between your IDM artist of choice (say Ae, for example) and your experimental (Oval hands down for me). You get plenty of both: solid grooves and granular digital decomposition. Warped tunes and more conventional melodies. Great, great record. It sounds like a JPEG, lossy compression that doesn't mar the whole recording but only parts, and the compression artifacts are more-often-than-not interesting rather than undesirable. Brad